Do you like the Mentalist? Hands are goin' up - okay, hands are not going up

One of my earliest experiences of Tokusatsu was the opening moments of Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger, where the main character drives a giant toy across an alien planet's surface and crashes through a wall into a church where dozens of cats are having what is clearly a Christian wedding ceremony, so obviously there's some kind of cultural osmosis going on, most likely fueled by Christianity(1) being the dominant theological orthodoxy of the Western media that permeates the vast majority of popular culture, making it utterly amazing that in the year 2015, someone who lives and works in the West knows absolutely nothing about Christianity beyond the words "God, "Devil", and that angels have wings - although they somehow also do not know that angels are called angels.  Like I say, it's pretty amazing - but "amazing" does not in this instance translate to "good television."
Don't get me wrong, though, The Messengers is not embarrassingly terrible all of the time, most of the time it is competently made and doesn't draw attention to itself or the mountain of cliches it heaps upon your screen, but every five minutes or so there's something so cliched or thick-headed happening that a little voice starts going "holy cats, you are actually sitting here watching this."
The voice continues: "what if someone came in and saw you?  What if that bit was the first thing they saw of this show, and they thought it was like this all the time, and that you choose to watch a show like this?"  I am not saying that you would be less embarrassed if someone came into the room and found you watching pornography, but it's a close thing.  I would probably grab my phone quickly and pretend that I didn't notice what was on my tv because I was busy masturbating to animal-based pornography videos I had saved to my flash card and no you can't see them but they definately exist and I was whacking it hard to them and not watching The Messengers - if that's even what that show is called because I wouldn't know.
That's basically the quality of The Messengers - as long as you are completely alone and no-one knows you're watching it, you could probably sit through an episode, but you would be in no doubt that what you were watching was not very good.  I made it all the way through episode 2, but didn't make it to the end of the recap at the start of episode 3.  I suppose that here in the last paragraph I should thematically link back to the first paragraph's subject matter of Christianity in the media and maybe make some kind of point about the makers of The Messengers not drawing upon Christianity but instead the villainous interpretation of its mythology presented in post-millennial efforts such as Constantine, Supernatural, and Spawn comic books, if for no other reason than that I can also link back to my past posts about tv writing feeding upon itself like a human centipede and the viewer being the person at the back, so that is what I have just done.



(1) And by "Christianity" I of course mean "Protestantism", as Catholicism is only featured in media if they need to do something about guilt, forgiveness, or pedophiles.

Oh great, I probably just killed someone and I lost my best knife

The Legend of Boggy Creek is the proto-Blair Witch movie (say what you will about the Blair Witch franchise, I always liked that the sequel worked from the notion that found footage was over and only a cunt would keep at it), and most of its thrills come from throwing its central concept right out there in broad daylight and none of this "WHAT IS IT WHAT IS IT WHATS GOING ON OMG WHATS GOIN ON YOU GUYS OMG" bullshit that typifies modern horror moviemaking's fascination with the idea that it is dealing with people encountering the mysterious rather than making its money from depicting how people deal with their encounters with the mysterious - we simply don't need ninety minutes of the creature in the shadows, and movies like Legend of Boggy Creek stand alongside The Host and Aliens as examples of film where you can let the cat out of the bag early on and still do a good frightener.
It's showing its age, but the makers really do their best with the tiny budget and a cast drawn from the citizenry of the town where the film was made, including the local high school - which makes the reaction of the kids having a sleepover all the more hilarious when they get frightened and scramble to jam bullets in "the woman's rifle" they've been left with so they can get killin' whatever's at large.  Usually dumb teens in these movies are just stereotypes that could have stepped out of a cop procedural like CSI, only relocated to somewhere with trees, but the instinctive impulse to get a shooting iron rings true as the actions of a smalltown type and the rest of the functional acting lends things a matter-of-fact charm that reinforces the feeling of a dated documentary rather than a trashy drive-in feature.

In Minnesota I'd be a supermodel

Whoopsy.  Got so used to not posting daily I forgot to post anything yesterday, but to be fair, I haven't watched much new genre tv lately so I'd be pressed to think of a way to fill the space anyway.

As long as hot dogs can be hats, anything is possible

I am not very good at it so I avoid doing it in work for other people, but I like doing colouring and it's fine for stuff I'll bung up on Comicsy for 20p or something like that.
Despite being - or perhaps precisely because it is - a movie that nicks all its best ideas from Beastmaster 2, Thor: The Dark World is a fun B-movie masquerading as an angsty superhero drama full of universe-shattering McGuffins that make every battle one for All The Marbles, and it pulls off the conceit very well and no-one is any the wiser despite laser-toting elves and Asguardian gods doing professional wrestling moves in the middle of battles.  It surprises me not that it went on to make over half a billion dollars.

I'm up to my ears in meringue

Just thumbnailing the next comic project I'll be getting stuck into shortly.  As you can tell, I don't really sweat things like anatomy and perspective at this stage as these are problems for Future Bryan - haha that guy is such a rube, he always ends up cleaning up my messes.  Schmuck.

Subatomic Party Girls is a concept just waiting to be made into a truly terrible film that people will decry for years as one of the worst movies ever made alongside Batman and Robin and that Eddie Murphy thing about the man on the Moon who runs a bar or something, which I get the impression would suit its redneck gobshite writer Chris Sims down to the ground, though what his co-writer Chad Bowers would make of such a turn of events I have no idea as he doesn't seem to have invested as much time developing a web persona as Sims has, though in my mind and for the purpose of comedic juxtaposition, I like to think of him as some sort of upper class gentleman type, a kind of Turkey to Sims' Huggy Bear.  Of artist Erica Henderson, I have no idea where to go with dated cultural analogies, but she sure does make a bold and purdy page.
Mostly being Josie and the Pussycats by way of a Gurihiru visual filter, Subatomic Party Girls is the tale of an all-girl rock trio blasted to the other side of the galaxy in a PR stunt gone wrong who have to play for their lives when they run into a Bob Segar-worshipping cult led by Jabba The Hutt.

Though it's knowingly dumb, it doesn't trade in self-mockery and so comes off as confident both in itself and in its readers to be in on the joke without needing reassurances in the same way the likes of Deadpool or Harley Quinn do.  Three issues in, it maybe feels a bit like there's been half that, so it's going to make a fine trade collection down the line even if it feels a little light as a monthly right now.

I just had a very productive conversation and actions were taken and change is in the air

Yes I am doing colouring even though I promised I would never do so again because I can't do it without making things look like one of those Walt Disney movies they made up until around the turn of the millennium when they discovered that CGI was much cheaper and yet paradoxically the movies now cost a minimum of 150 million dollars to make despite this number being six times greater than the last "expensive" cel-shaded effort the studio churned out, but I am doing it to wind down so please don't judge me.  Unless I owe you pages and I should be doing those right now, then you can judge the Hell outta me - but you'll still be whistling for those pages.

Say, did you know Johnny Cash wrote and performed a song dedicated to the car driven by the Dukes of Hazzard?  I do not know why my mind is blown by this news, but here we are.

I'm going to the Lego store and getting me a big-ass R2D2

I shan't pretend to have gotten much drawing done today as I was off in the clouds daydreaming for most of it, or "writing" as lazy layabout gobshites like to call it.  I shan't pretend I got much done on that front, either, but I'm putting the time in to create something a bit more structured and considered than is my usual schtick, as mostly when I write something I just make it up as I go and should you wish to check the last few years of blog posts, I think we can agree that it shows.  All the same, not a jot of dialogue or a single panel description did I put down, as today I concentrated on "plot", of all things, and then went back and jiggered stuff around to make the themes work - oh God themes now - and I'm still not finished doing it.
It's still just daydreaming, though.

If things was so great they never woulda changed

About Time is the most middle-class thing I have ever seen in my life.
That is all.

I don't sleep, I just dream

Catching up on the backlog again with some clumsy but sadly necessary colouring.  I can never get my shit together on Mondays so it's great to have something to relax with in front of the tv so I can pretend I'm busy and not just catching up on my Transformers: Prime watching - or as it was called this (final) season, Transformers: Prime: Beast Hunters, a pointlessly busy title for a pointlessly drawn-out season.  The reworked theme and intro sucked, while the storyline meanders before the animation budget implodes and the season showdown takes place on a giant toilet seat with a PS3 screensaver as a background so overall it's not a great send-off for a series that started out well with some shameless but fun mash-ups of scenes and ideas from sources as disparate as John Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness and Stargate, but there were some fun retakes on Transformers lore along the way.

The girls and I are gonna shoot a video in your driveway

So I'm drawing post-apocalyptic comics because I apparently want to be That Kind Of Comics Person now.  Given my epic consumption of even the trashiest post-nuclear narratives in the last few months, this was probably an inevitable turn-up for the books much like metal fans taking art classes but still ending up drawing skulls and snakes, or - if they're a bit ambitious - bare ladies, but I take some solace that the project more than anything else errs towards shamelessly channeling A Canticle For Liebowitz even though I wasn't consciously doing so going in.  I mean, Mad Max and Fist of the North Star clones are plentiful enough that no-one wants another, surely?
I am gambling on the answer to that one being "yes."

Every time you laugh at a Perrier-nominated act, a little baby dies

If you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose

Some appalling colour choices today, but this is what happens when I get 12 hours to put a whole page together - thankfully, pitch pages will go straight in a bin and never embarrass me publicly.  I leave that to karaoke.

Been watching the final season of Treme, a fine antidote to the notion - fuelled by the likes of Glee - that America has no culture.  Hitting the occasional predictable note so far, but still fine television that I'll miss something rotten.

So let's just fire up the Batmanmobile, go to a taco stand and eat some feelings

No screen grabs today as I have been doing "real" work unrelated to comics - because yes, despite evidence to the contrary (the blog, Twitter), I do actually do something constructive with my time - so instead I can only sketch what I picture the end of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #79 to be like based entirely on Colin Smith's description of the contents.

Can we at least not drive by Middle Earth Comics and Trampoline World? People look up to me in this town.

I have summed up Dads in seven seconds, so that others may be spared:

I got a prescription so hopefully I'll stop drinking appletinis and crying all the time

Finished up the gothy horror strip and now I'm moving on to an untitled cavemen project, or possibly Redneck Big Time Happy Rocketship Adventure (provisional title), or maybe even Overly Condensed Superhero Pirate Punching Incident (sadly accurate provisional title).
Just checked how many comics pages I've drawn so far this year and I have a grand total of 10 in the bank, which isn't a great tally to have 16 days into the new year even if I did have to ink, colour and letter the pages, too - see, it's not a great excuse because I'm supposed to be making my own comics and that traditionally entails doing everything myself.
Also today I watched more Dads.  I can't help it, really: the worse the reviews and the more whiny and entitled the detractors become, the more I feel compelled to watch it in spite of them.  I hate to be the one to say this, but I'm starting to think the internet is full of dicks.

Pardon me for being alive in the '90s and having two ears connected to a heart

I'm doing it again - watching Intelligence's second episode for all my dismissals of the first installment's reliance upon cliche and unoriginality... it's growing on me, but they really need to rein in the exposition and accept that at some point the audience is on their own.

You damned Vulcans and your defined parameters!

Bitten is so bad that when terrorists commit their next atrocity upon the United States, the angry ghost of Jerry Falwell will rise from his grave and say that alongside Paganism, abortion, feminism and being gay, Bitten was why America had it coming.  He will, of course, be utterly wrong.  About the first four.
I don't even know where to start, but probably the lecturer who gets his Jungian theory wrong is as good a place as any (because the scene comes early in the show).  Basically he talks at length about how the concept of the anima and the animus* sound a bit like "animal" so that's the same thing as being about werewolves.  When the lecturer who looks like a male model speaks, the only reaction shots we see are from groups of attractive young women sitting together in the audience.  It generally manages to go downhill from there - and fair play that must have taken some effort - but before we get to that point we also open on a sex scene - the very first thing we see in the very first episode is the female lead riding cowgirl on an anonymous rod, then making excuses to rush outside to turn into a werewolf because apparently she forgot this was something she does.
Basically, Bitten is not a show for feminists, and I don't mean that it has an unhealthy male gaze, I mean that for a show that lingers on them as sexual creatures it does not actually seem to like women very much.  There's a sub-genre in horror that creates an equation between the female menstrual cycle and lycanthropy, and Bitten is an unfortunate addition to exploring this "curse" analogy subconsciously rather than as text, with a character trying to distance herself from her natural "cycles" and being punished for it by turning into a raging bunny-killing monster, and let me be very clear about this: the character actually kills a bunny after turning into a  menstrual rage monster, this happens in the pre-credits sequence moments after the sex scene and the character's stripping in a dirty alleyway.
Oh, and a guy tells a woman she's a slut in the first couple of minutes of the show.  That may also be an indicator of troubling subtext, along with the unsurprising failure of the Bechdel Test in an almost suicidally-spectacular fashion - women don't just talk about men when they're alone, they talk about the fantastic sex they have with those men, even though one of the two women in the conversation is the man's sister.  What the heck that is about I cannot fathom, but I am beginning to have an inkling why the writers might have been thinking about psychiatry lately.

I also managed to check out the Carrie remake for some reason, as I didn't even like the original as I just found it unpleasant more than scary.  The remake is largely a bit of a hoot in hystericalising things while also trying to make it seem like maybe kids aren't inherently evil so much as they are careless and occasionally insensitive - it's a bizarre flip-flop act to be sure, and sort of falls apart later when we get to scenes that take a clear delight in the suffering and murder of children, but up until then, the overblown nature of it was kind of entertaining, if potentially grating to those not inclined to indulge it.




* In Jungian philosophy, the anima and animus are the complimentary "masculine" or "feminine" elements of the human psyche.  Put simply, the animus is the masculine element of the female psyche, while the anima is the feminine element of the male - the writers of Bitten somehow manage to get these two mixed up, and also somehow manage to think that what Jung meant was that everyone is secretly the Hulk.

I'm sorry, I have a very ticklish middle toe. Also what you said was ridiculous.

Weekend time!
Just sitting down to my first beer and this week's episode of the seemingly never-ending Revenge.  Ugh, I hate myself sometimes - I managed to quit Vampire Diaries this late into its lifespan (incestuous homoeroticism apparently is not really my thing) but I still can't quit you, Revenge.  I should ideally be writing a review of it after I watch the episode rather than before, but here we are.
I'll probably enjoy it, so I bid you all do the same with your weekend.  Have a good one!

The Japanese possess unbelievable strength when backed into a corner!

"Intelligence is an optimistically titled show" opines the alternate-universe me who is a bit more of a prick than I am when it comes to reviewing things "because it is basically stupid and dumb and Chuck without jokes" Alt-Me continues, not realising they already made Chuck without jokes - it was called Chuck - and missing that Chuck was really just a repackaged Jake 2.0, which was itself a repackaged Max Steel they tried to pass off as a Six Million Dollar Man homage because no-one wants to admit they based their tv show on a cartoon but will cop to being inspired by a decades-old cheesefest because nostalgia is an accepted coin of the realm in entertainment these days - but yeah, we're at the back of the Human Centipede again.
Alt-Me goes on in the usual rambling fashion about Intelligence being stupid and cliche-ridden, but that's not really a problem in television terms as the Battlestar Galactica remake proved that you didn't have to be original or tell new stories to be considered innovative or fresh, you could just get away with the same old plots genre tv has been churning out for decades as long as you put a new spin on the presentation: mainly by having a straight face and acting like you mean it when you say things like "these evil sex robots are up to something."  It's a bit like the 1966 Batman movie where he's running around with a big black ball with a fizzing fuse coming out of it going "some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!" and in Dark Knight Rises he does exactly the same thing except there's no jokes and no-one ever smiles and for some reason it's the former that's considered juvenile.  Anyhoo, that second Rises one is modern tv in a nutshell: do the same old thing everyone else has done already but don't hang a lampshade on it like you have something to apologize for.
And so to Intelligence, which is, for all its faults, an inoffensive romp whose biggest failing is likely that it's lost the lead to the nearly-identical Blacklist (bar the genre trappings of Intelligence's central McGuffin, of course), though debuting months/years after an identical tv series hasn't done much harm to The Mentalist, Arrow, Being Human, and so on, so Intelligence might be okay, possibly moreso if they stop making Josh Holloway's character so unlikeable in an attempt to make him more like Sawyer from Lost and just accept that he's a naturally likeable chap and try to play to that instead.  I would be lying if I didn't admit that I was laughing really hard at a lot of  how clumsy some of it was, mind, like the exposition that comprises the entirety of some characters' dialogue - the CSI castmember woman person especially is like some kind of machine.

Coffee is the element I float in, my dear - be it exquisite or vile

Seeing as I'm blogging about whatever random episode of tosh I've just watched: how about this week's episode of Castle, eh?
No, I don't see this as being a particularly interesting avenue to explore, either, but here we are.  I am not really sure what to make of Castle, as on one hand it clearly doesn't take itself too seriously, right up until it takes itself deadly serious, and usually these two things happen within moments of each other.  A cynical man - and lord knows I am not one of those - would suggest that it doesn't reward those with the functioning attention span of a normal adult and the writers are just throwing whatever at the screen as it's not meant to create a consistent internal logic or narrative in the way other comedy/murder-mystery man/woman shows like Elementary or even the late lamented Monk do, it's just some stuff on a tv that happens once a week to stop you turning over to see if there's a repeat of Star Trek Voyager on somewhere, and fair play it manages that because of the way it is made, as I constantly confuse Castle with other things, like the Charlie Sheen shitcom Anger Management, which began a sub-plot about a character hooking up with a hippy college dropout character that hasn't been relevant for almost thirty years but someone in a writing room somewhere noticed that some white guys had dreadlocks in a picture of something called Burning Man so that must mean hippies are relevant again, am I right?
Thus the domino effect of unoriginal tv writing began - that strange morphic resonance where a plot that's been worked into a 42 minute episode of one tv show suddenly gets used in another, and another, and another - and tv shows started lining up the same character and plot where a female cast member they didn't know what else to do with suddenly got a hippie boyfriend who didn't understand boundaries, capitalism, sarcasm, and so on - basically, it was a low point for Anger Management and just to put that comment in perspective, it was a low point FOR ANGER MANAGEMENT, so why anyone on the Castle writing staff thought "yep, that's a winner, let's transplant that storyline wholesale into our series" is beyond me.  Mind you, this week's episode had a completely unironic recreation of Kirk's birth scene from the 2009 Star Trek reboot - and I mean, really, really unironic, right down to dialogue, camera framing, setting the conversation between father and mother-to-be over a phone half in an ambulance and the other half in a burning set, near-identical soundtrack choice, and it was not a homage, followed shortly after by a scene which was not a homage to The Fugitive even though one of the characters in the scene was actually called Kimble, and all this was framed by a plot that was not a homage to the plot of Backdraft yet was completely identical to it.  I don't even think it was deliberate - I think the writers of Castle have entered a state where they just take in all the things they've seen elsewhere and the viewer is more or less the back end of their Human Centipede.  It's an efficient process, I'll grant them that, but it's starting to leave a bad taste.